The most effective and spectacular promotion is that done by you, our
readers, design clients, customers, and yacht design students. Other
than this web site we do not advertise or promote. You are an essential part of
helping us help more people have happier lives through boats. Only you can
bring new people to our site. Even if you don't
ever find something on our careers page that you just have to do, and work with us
here or collaboratively over the Internet, you are one of the most important
members of our team and the key to bringing our services and products to the
people who need them. This web site is here to
provide information for those who are referred to us but we do not go out and
advertise the site or push others to link to us.

Instead of promotion we rely on you. The key to our expansion has
always been in your hands. When you refer others to our site it is worth
far more than anything we could say about ourselves in some ad somewhere and it
brings in more people than any conceivable ad campaign. Because this
works so well we need no advertising budget. This means that everything
from our custom and stock designs to our student tuition can be substantiallylower in cost. This benefits everyone. Today we are well known as moderate in our custom design
costs, and have been able to keep tuition in our schoolmuch lower in comparison with a "competitor" who advertises in the major
boating magazines a tremendous amount. This is all because of you.

In the "old days" of the mid-1990s and before, we knew "word of mouth" worked well
and relied on promotion by our friends to supplement the article writing that we
did for the boating magazines and a few very modest ads. People talked to their friends
at their boat yard or yacht club and referred people to us because they
felt we really cared about customer happiness and really tried hard to do a good
job. Occasionally they even did this over the telephone or in letters.
Despite the fleeting nature of these contacts and the rather random nature of
the communications, these word of mouth moments have traditionally been far
more important to our design firm and school than any other promotion method
short of writing articles and books.

Today the Internet has made a stunning difference. The impact you can have is
now somuch greater that I would venture to
say that instead of your personal promotion efforts being a valuable supplement
to traditional advertising they are the major driving force in whether people
will come to us for advice and for the products and services that we offer.
So what are the methods you can use to drive us to greater success in serving
the people in the world with a serious interest in boats?

1. Personal Contact: You can continue to talk to your friends at get togethers, at the
yacht club, etc. When you are rafted up in a quiet cove with other boats
you can mention anything that we have done for you or helped you out with.
You can mention us, as appropriate, in your letters, etc.

2. Professional Referral: If you are a professional in the industry you can do all of the
above and will have even more weight with those you communicate with.

3. Email Contacts: In addition these days you will often have friends you email back and
forth with who might well be happy to know about us.

4. Forum Participation: Perhaps you participate in discussion groups or "forums" on line.
There are several ways you can help us out in this regard. First, you may find discussions already talking about us. Sometimes you
may feel that these discussions could benefit from our input. Sometimes
you may have comments to offer yourselves. Sometimes you may just want to
recommend us as a source of advice. You may simply want to find as many of
these forums as possible and simply put a mention of how you feel we can help,
giving a link to our site. But above all occasionally people will have a complaint
about us that they have not shared with us or which they feel was not properly
resolved. Since we will go a very long way to see the customer's point of view
and will try to do just about anything as long as it isn't unfair to other
customers to accommodate them and make them happy, we really want to know about
these things. You can be sure that any response we make in a forum will be
kind and supportive, with continued expressions of good will
toward the customer, no matter how extreme the complainant is in their statements,
so you need not worry about bringing us into the discussion. If no one
refers this complaint to us we will never have the opportunity to show that we
will work hard and compassionately to help even the most vindictive person.
We have found that people's general reaction to a complaint that is resolved
nicely by us, no matter how unkind or even unfair the customer's comments were,
is to be more confident and more supportive of us than if they hear nothing but
praise. Your help is extremely vital with forums. There are just
too many forums or discussion groups for us to follow even a reasonable number
of them, given our large volume of work and the always limited number of people
we have in relation to the work load, yet there are people on these forums whom
we could help have happier lives in one way or another if you can guide them to
us.

5. Link sites: Today many people have huge sites with lists of
designers, schools, marine publishing houses, and sources for hardware and
materials, plus other marine services along with links to the various sites. If we aren't on these you
may want to suggest us. In some cases anyone can add a description and a
link. You may wish to do this or you may refer us to the site. We
have essentially no spare time to find these sites and submit our information to
them. Remember the top search engines will tend to rank us higher based
upon the number of links to our site. Therefore the more links there are
at link sites the easier it will be for people to find us even if they never
know these links sites exist!

6. Your own web site: In many cases you may have a web site of your own
with interesting material that draws others to your site. It can be
truly amazing how much business will come to us from a review of our site on
even the most modest site. If our site is valuable to you, chances are it
will be valuable to those drawn to your site by common interests. Of course
as mentioned above this also makes us easier to find on the search engines too!

7. Asking for Articles from Us: These days we are far too busy
to do up articles and send them out to the boating magazines on speculation.
However if you would like to see an article from us on a particular topic
in your favorite boating magazine, contacting the editor with your
request and referring them to our web site and giving them our contact
information may result in the editor approaching us for an article.
Often we are able to put together articles that will help many people
very quickly out of our large library of material that we have already
researched and written for the use of our staff, our students, boatbuilders,
other designers, and live aboards.

The net result of all of this is
that through persistent promotion by you in the above manner, we can achieve a
degree of service to serious cruising boat people very difficult to achieve in the past.
You can bring us
to the attention of more of the approximately 180,000,000 qualified customers we
estimate exist all over the world. This helps us by providing more volume
of business to spread our costs over, thus helping us keep our prices down while
providing more and better service. It also helps us provide good work in
the industry to people who work both here in Eastport and in supporting and
collaborative relationships with us from all over the world.

Finally we want to mention that we always want to hear your suggestions for
how we can better serve our industry. You are a very important part of our
group.